The First Man in Rome (29 page)

But there was one cheering aspect to this foetid dampness; mushroom season arrived with a phenomenal surplus. Always avid for the fragrant umbrellas after the normal summer dry, the whole city gobbled mushrooms, rich and poor alike.

And Sulla was once again loaded down with Julilla's letters, after a wonderful wet two weeks which had prevented Julilla's girl from finding him to drop them into his toga. His craving to quit Rome escalated until he knew if he didn't shake Rome's vaporous miasma off himself for the space of one little day, he would truly go mad at last. Metrobius and his protector, Scylax, were vacationing in Cumae, and Sulla didn't want to spend that day of respite alone. So he resolved that he would take Clitumna and Nicopolis on a picnic to his favorite spot outside the city.

"Come on, girls," he said to them on the third fine dawn in a row, "put on your glad rags, and I'll take you on a picnic!"

The girls—neither feeling at all girlish—looked at him with the sour derision of those in no mood to be jollied out of their doldrums, and declined to budge from the communal bed, though the humid night had left it sweatily soaked.

"You both need some fresh air," Sulla persisted.

"We are living on the Palatine because there is nothing wrong with the air up here," said Clitumna, turning her back.

"At the moment the air on the Palatine is no better than any other air in Rome—it's full of the stink of drains and washing," he said. "Come on, do! I've hired a carriage and we'll head off in the direction of Tibur—lunch in the woods—see if we can catch a fish or two—or buy a fish or two, and a good fat rabbit straight out of the trap—and come home before dark feeling a lot happier."

"No," said Clitumna querulously.

Nicopolis wavered. "Well..."

That was enough for Sulla. "Get ready, I'll be back in a few moments," he said, and stretched luxuriantly. "Oh, I am so tired of being cooped up inside this house!"

"So am I," said Nicopolis, and got out of bed.

Clitumna continued to lie with her face to the wall, while Sulla went off to the kitchen to command a picnic lunch.

"Do come," he said to Clitumna as he donned a clean tunic and laced on open boots.

She refused to answer.

"Have it your own way, then," he said as he went to the door. "Nicopolis and I will see you this evening."

She refused to answer.

Thus the picnic party consisted only of Nicopolis and Sulla and a big hamper of goodies the cook had thrown together at late notice, wishing he could go along himself. At the foot of the Steps of Cacus an open two-wheeled gig was waiting; Sulla helped Nicopolis up into the passenger's seat, then hoisted himself into the driver's seat.

"Away we go," he said happily, gathering in the reins and experiencing an extraordinary spurt of lightheartedness, a rare sense of freedom. He confessed to himself that he wasn't sorry Clitumna had declined to come. Nicopolis was company enough. "Gee up, you mules!" he cried.

The mules geed up nicely; the gig rattled down the Valley of Murcia in which the Circus Maximus lay, and left the city through the Capena Gate. Alas, the view at first was neither interesting nor cheering, for the ring road Sulla took in heading east crossed the great cemeteries of Rome. Tombstones and more tombstones—not the imposing mausolea and sepulchra of the rich and noble which flanked every arterial road out of the city, but the gravestones of simpler souls. Every Roman and Greek, even the poorest, even the slaves, dreamed that after his going he would be able to afford a princely monument to testify that he had onceexisted. For that reason, both poor and slaves belonged to burial clubs, and contributed every tiny mite they could afford to the club funds, carefully managed and invested; embezzlement was rife in Rome as in any place of human habitation, but the burial clubs were so jealously policed by their members that their executives had no choice save to be honest. A good funeral and a lovely monument
mattered.

A crossroads formed the central point of the huge necropolis sprawled over the whole Campus Esquilinus, and there at the crossroads stood the massive temple of Venus Libitina, in the midst of a leafy grove of sacred trees. Inside the temple's podium lay the registers in which the names of Rome's dead citizens were inscribed, and there too lay chest after chest of money paid in over the centuries to register each citizen death. In consequence the temple was enormously rich, the funds belonging to the State, yet never touched. The Venus was that Venus who ruled the dead, not the living, that Venus who presided over the extinction of the procreative force. And her temple grove was the headquarters of Rome's guild of undertakers. Behind the precinct of Venus Libitina was an area of open space on which the funeral pyres were built, and beyond that was the paupers' cemetery, a constantly changing network of pits filled with bodies, lime, soil. Few, citizens or noncitizens, elected to be inhumed, apart from the Jews, who were buried in one section of the necropolis, and the aristocrats of the Famous Family Cornelius, who were buried along the Via Appia; thus most of the monuments transforming the Campus Esquilinus into a crowded little stone city housed urns of ashes rather than decomposing bodies. No one could be buried within Rome's sacred boundary, not even the greatest.

However, once the gig passed beneath the arches of the two aqueducts which brought water to the teeming northeastern hills of the city, the vista changed. Farmlands stretched in all directions, market gardens at first, then grass pastures and wheat fields.

Despite the effect the downpour had had on the Via Tiburtina (the densely packed layer of gravel, tufa dust, and sand on top of the paving stones had been eroded), the two in the gig were thoroughly enjoying themselves. The sun was hot but the breeze cooling, Nicopolis's parasol was large enough to shade Sulla's snow-white skin as well as her own olive hide, and the mules turned out to be a willingly tractable pair. Too sensible to force the pace, Sulla let his team find their own, and the miles trotted by delightfully.

To go all the way to Tibur and back was impossible in one day, but Sulla's favorite spot lay well short of the climb up to Tibur itself. Some distance out of Rome was a forest that stretched all the way into the ranges which rose, ever increasing in height, to the massif of the Great Rock, Italy's highest mountain. This forest cut diagonally across the route of the road for perhaps a mile before wandering off crosscountry; the road then entered the Anio River valley, most fertile, eminently arable.

However, the mile or so of forest was harder ground, and here Sulla left the road, directing the mules down an un-paved wagon track which dived into the trees and finally petered out.

"Here we are," said Sulla, jumping down and coming round to help Nicopolis, who found herself stiff and a little sore. "I know it doesn't look promising, but walk a little way further with me and I'll show you a place well worth the ride."

First he unharnessed the mules and hobbled them, then he shoved the gig off the track into the shade of some bushes and took the picnic hamper out of it, hoisting it onto his shoulder.

"How do you know so much about dealing with mules and harness?" Nicopolis asked as she followed Sulla into the trees, picking her way carefully.

"Anyone does who's worked in the Port of Rome," said Sulla over his unburdened shoulder. "Take it slowly, now! We're not going far, and there's no hurry."

Indeed, they had made good time. Since the month was early September, the twelve hours of daylight were still on the long side at sixty-five minutes each; it still wanted two hours before noon when Sulla and Nicopolis entered the woods.

"This isn't virgin forest," he said, "which is probably why no one logs in it. In the old days this land was given over to wheat, but after the grain started coming from Sicily and Sardinia and Africa Province, the farmers moved into Rome and left the trees to grow back, for it's poor soil."

"You're amazing, Lucius Cornelius," she said, trying to keep up with Sulla's long, easy strides. "How is it that you know so many things about the world?''

"It's my luck. What I hear or read, I remember."

They emerged then into an enchanting clearing, grassy and filled with late-summer flowers—pink and white cosmos, great blooming jungles of pink and white rambling roses, and lupines in tall spikes, pink and white. Through the clearing flowed a stream in full spate from the rain, its bed filled with jagged rocks which divided its waters into deep still pools and foaming cascades; the sun glittered and flashed off its surface, amid dragonflies and little birds.

"Oh, how beautiful!" cried Nicopolis.

"I found it last year when I went away for those few months," he said, putting the hamper down in a patch of shade. "My gig cast a wheel right where that track runs into the forest, and I had to put Metrobius up on one of the mules and send him to Tibur for help. While I waited, I explored."

It gave Nicopolis no satisfaction to know that the despised and feared Metrobius had undoubtedly been shown this special place first, but she said nothing, simply flopped down in the grass and watched Sulla take a big skin of wine from the interior of the hamper. He immersed the wineskin in the stream where a natural fence of rocks anchored it, then took off his tunic and removed his open boots, all he wore.

Sulla's lighthearted mood still lay inside his bones, as warming as the sun upon his skin; he stretched, smiling, and looked about the glade with an affection which had nothing to do with Metrobius or Nicopolis. Simply, his pleasure came from a divorcement from the predicaments and frustrations which so hedged his normal life around, a place where he could tell himself that time did not move, politics did not exist, people were classless, and money an invention for the future. His moments of pure happiness were so few and dispersed so thinly along the route march of his life that he remembered every single one of them with piercing clarity—the day when the jumble of squiggles on a piece of paper suddenly turned into understandable thoughts, the hour in which an enormously kind and thoughtful man had shown him how perfect the act of love could be, the stunning emancipation of his father's death, and the realization that this clearing in a forest was the first piece of land he had ever been able to call his own, in that it belonged to no one who cared enough to visit it except for him. And that was all. The sum total. None was founded in an appreciation of beauty, or even of the process of living; they represented the acquisition of literacy, erotic pleasure, freedom from authority, and property. For those were the things Sulla prized, the things Sulla wanted.

Fascinated, Nicopolis watched him without even beginning to understand the source of his happiness, marveling at the absolute whiteness of his body in full sun—a sight she had never seen before—and the fiery gold of head and chest and groin. All far too much to resist; she doffed her own light robe and the shift she wore beneath it, its long back tail caught between her legs and pinned in front, until she too was naked and could relish the kiss of the sun.

They waded into one of the deep pools, gasping with the cold, stayed there long enough to warm up while Sulla played with her erect nipples and her beautiful breasts, then clambered out upon the thick soft grass and made love while they dried off. After which they ate their lunch, breads and cheeses and hard-boiled eggs and chicken wings, washed down with the chilly wine. She made a wreath of flowers for Sulla's hair, then made another for her own, and rolled over three times from the sheer voluptuous gratification of being alive.

"Oh, this is wonderful!" she sighed. "Clitumna doesn't know what she's missing."

"Clitumna never knows what she's missing," said Sulla.

"Oh, I don't know," said Nicopolis idly, the mischief-bee back buzzing inside her mind. "She's missing Sticky Stichy." And she began to hum the ditty about murder until she caught the flickering end of a glance from him that told her he was becoming angry. She didn't honestly believe Sulla had contrived at Stichus's death, but when she implied for the first time that Sulla had, she picked up interesting echoes of alarm from Sulla, and so kept it up from sheer idle curiosity.

Time to stop it. Leaping to her feet, she held out her hands to Sulla, still lying full length. "Come on, lazybones, I want to walk under the trees and cool off," she said.

He rose obediently, took her hand, and strolled with her under the eaves of the forest, where no undergrowth marred the carpet of sodden leaves, warm after the day's perfect portion of sun. Being barefoot was a treat.

And there they were! A miniature army of the most exquisite mushrooms Nicopolis had ever seen, every last one unmarked by insect hole or animal paw, purest white, fat and fleshy of canopy yet nicely slender of stalk, and giving off a heady aroma of earth.

"Oh, goody!" she cried, dropping to her knees.

Sulla grimaced. "Come on," he said.

"No, don't be mean just because
you
dislike mushrooms! Please, Lucius Cornelius, please! Go back to the hamper and find me a cloth—I'm going to take some of these home for my supper," said Nicopolis, voice determined.

"They mightn't be good ones," he said, not moving.

"Nonsense, of course they're good! Look! There's no membrane covering up the gills, no spots, no red color. They smell superb too. And this isn't an oak, is it?" She looked up at the tree in the base of which the mushrooms were growing.

Sulla eyed is* deeply scalloped leaves and experienced a vision of the inevitability of fate, the pointing finger of his lucky goddess. "No, it's not an oak," he said.

"Then please! Please?" she wheedled.

He sighed. "All right, have it your own way."

A whole miniature army of mushrooms perished as Nicopolis selected her treasure trove, then wrapped it in the napkin Sulla had brought her and carefully laid it in the bottom of the hamper, where it would be protected from the heat as they drove home.

"I don't know why you and Clitumna don't like mushrooms," she said after they were ensconced in the gig again, and the mules were trotting eagerly in the direction of their stables.